


Nothing So Necessary

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Fluff, War & Peace, and nothing else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 08:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15069134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Jemma, regular patron of a coffee shop, and Fitz, gainful employee of the same, stumble into a friendship with all the grace of Pierre Bezhukov, and Jemma learns her own mind just a little bit later than Natasha Rostov.[an accidental book club AU]





	Nothing So Necessary

**Author's Note:**

> Although the likelihood that anyone will care is small, I must in good conscience admit that this fic contains spoilers for War & Peace.

Jemma waved goodbye to the last of her book club members as they left Cuppa—still happily listing the rude but accurate names the internet would call Victor Frankenstein—and settled back into the armchair with a happy sigh. Her watch displayed 9:45, or thereabouts; she had just enough time to finish off both the pot of tea and the chapter of _The Night Circus_ she had been reading when the group arrived. Cuppa’s late closing time was only one of its many charms. Tea in hand, she flipped to her place and began: _I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you_.

“Erm, excuse me.”

Her head snapped up. Cuppa’s newest barista—he of the blue, blue eyes and the grim, grim scowl, who made change in his head and never let the tea over-brew—stood awkwardly before her, strangling a mop handle. “You’re Scottish!” she blurted out, gasping a little as tea sloshed into her lap. She hadn’t meant to start that much, but he _had_ surprised her in the middle of a sentence, and she _hadn’t_ been expecting to hear a familiar accent. In the whole month he’d been here, she didn’t think she’d heard him say two words together. She wasn’t even sure of his name.

Whoever-he-was pulled a towel from his apron and tossed it to her before resuming his attempted murder of a mop. Shuffling his weight from one foot to the other, he scratched at his cheek. “Yeah. Um, I’m s’posed to tell you we’ll be closing in ten minutes. It’s a requirement. I mean, I know you know what time we close, but—”

“How do you know I know?” she asked as she dabbed.

“I’ve seen you in here before. And you have one of the resident scholar cubbies.” He indicated the wooden lockers that lined the back of the shop, which, indeed, housed the stacks of notes and tomes she hoped to turn into a book. “You’re a regular. So you know. I just have to tell you. Sorry to interrupt.”

Laughing lightly, she handed him back the towel. “Oh, that’s all right. I understand the need to follow protocol.”

He nodded, tucking it away. And stood there. And watched her open her book back up and find her place.

“Was. . . was there something else?” she asked when he showed no signs of going back to his work.

Red crept up his neck and into his ears, vivid enough to be seen even in the late-night light. “No. Well, actually, yeah, um—I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I thought I heard you say you wanted to read _War and Peace_?”

Perhaps her unsuccessful attempt to convince her book club had been louder than she thought. Ignoring a blush of her own, she marked her place and set the book down. “I do. Have you read it?”

“Yeah, it’s great. I just wanted to tell you, make sure you get Richard and Larissa.”

She felt her forehead crease. “I thought it was Boris and Natasha.”

“ _No_ ,” he said, emphatically, “it’s Natasha and Pierre, or Natasha and Andrei. But Richard and Larissa are the translators. Pevear and something Russian that starts with a V.”

Realizing he was offering her a gift, she scrabbled for a pen and jotted the names on her arm. “Why them?”

“Because,” he said, spreading his hands wide as though the answer lay in them, obvious to all, “they are the best. It’s a truth universally acknowledged.”

Her eyebrows flew up. A month of silence, then a strong opinion on Russian translators and an Austen quotation? What else might he be hiding? “Well, thank you. I’ll look into it.”

He nodded again, once, a clear end to the conversation, and started to wheel the bucket of dirty mop water away. This time, though, Celia and Marco didn’t seem quite as interesting. Her voice echoed in the empty shop as she called after him. “I’m Jemma.”

His eyes were wide as he looked over his shoulder. “I know. It’s on the calendar, your book club is, and on your cubby, and the tea tray—I mean—” Wincing, he pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and started over. “I’m Fitz.”

“Fitz,” she said, testing it out on her tongue. “Like Fitzgerald?”

“Just Fitz,” he said. “So, yeah. Richard and Larissa. And, four minutes to close.”

“All right. Thank you, Fitz.”

Jemma watched him disappear into the back room before pulling out her phone. Usually, she liked to do a little research before settling on a translation—especially with something as weighty as _War and Peace_ , writing style and clarity mattered, and Google easily provided ample evidence. This time, though, her thumb hovered only a second before selecting the Amazon app. If it was a truth universally acknowledged, after all. She’d be a fool to ignore the advice.

The next time she went to Cuppa, she happened to be carrying the book under her arm when she placed her order. It was larger than a brick, after all; carrying it in her bag would likely throw her back out of joint. As she had decided the moment she stepped into Cuppa and saw him manning the register. His eyes lit up when he saw it. “So, you got it then,” he said, dropping her change in her hand.

“Just started,” she said breezily, casually.

“And, um.” He turned to get her tea tray started, pointing at the selection of quotation mugs on the shelves behind the counter. “How are you getting on with the French?”

“I’ll have _Hell hath no fury_ , please. Oh, it’s fine. I read French, actually. For my work.”

He put the mug on the tray and added a napkin and the small milk jug. “You’re a linguist?”

“Historian. But you need French to know anything about Europe.”

“I’m envious. Reading it in the footnotes throws me off.” A four-cup pot joined the other items, and he squared up the handle before handing the whole thing across the counter. “One potted Colonel Pickering, with milk. Enjoy it.”

“The tea or the book?”

A smile flashed across his face, quick as lightning. “Just something to say. Of course you’ll enjoy both.”

The time after that, he sat down briefly at the table next to her, ostensibly to clean off a sticky bit of jam but really to look at the timeline she’d created to help her place the novel’s events in world history.

The time after that, she ended her book club early to ensure she had enough time to discuss Andrei’s relationship with the little princess with someone who, at the very least, knew what she was talking about.

The time after _that_ , she found herself drawing up elaborate battle plans to explain exactly what had happened during the battle of Austerlitz and how Nicolai found himself behind enemy lines while Fitz bent over them, listening intently with one hand buried in his hair and his thumb tapping against his lips, and she looked at him and stopped mid-sentence to say, “Fitz, I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

He froze, his hand dropping away from his mouth. “Wha—doing—?”

“Reading this.” She glanced away, unable to meet his steady gaze, and pretended she needed to freshen her tea. “I would enjoy it regardless, but it—it’s just, isn’t it better to have someone to talk about it with? That’s why I started my book club. But we don’t go as in depth as you and I do. I see things with you I would never see otherwise.”

He didn’t answer for a minute, busily breaking a biscuit into tiny pieces. Clasping her hands together on the edge of the table, she bit her lip nervously and hoped fervently she hadn’t spoiled everything by saying something. Maybe this only worked because it was casual. Maybe she had spooked him. Maybe she was going to have to read the remaining seven-eighths of the book by herself.

Then he looked up through his eyelashes and smiled—an actual, proper smile. “A book club for two, yeah? I like the book better this time, too.”  

She could only manage about a hundred pages a month, though it didn’t seem to matter. They found plenty to talk about, however much she had read: their experiences leaving home; his in-process doctorate in literature and her completed one in history; their favorite films; gossip about other Cuppa patrons. She liked the way he threw his whole body into listening, almost literally hanging on every word. He did the same when he talked, using his hands and face to underscore his points and twirling his highlighter between his fingers as he elaborated on Tolstoy’s brilliance. She smiled so much that her cheeks hurt by the time they had to say goodbye. He just _delighted_ her, she realized somewhere in the middle of volume two. She had never known someone so clever and quick-witted and sweet, much less someone who could hold their own against her tightly-held interpretations—stubborn opinions, he called them in the heat of an argument, but he changed his mind at least as often as she changed hers, and more often than not they came to a new and better understanding together.

“I don’t see how Andrei can ever forgive Natasha,” she maintained one night about six hundred pages in, shaking her head. “I won’t say I don’t understand her behavior, but it doesn’t excuse it: she was engaged to him, and she decided to elope with another man. How could you forgive that?”

Fitz shoved his last tangerine segment in his mouth and crossed his arms over his chest. “Where’s your generosity, Simmons? She’s young, and she made a mistake. If he really loves her, he’ll be hurt, yeah, and it will take time, but he’ll understand and forgive her.”

“Spoilers!” she cried, putting her hands over her ears. “Fitz, you promised!”

“No spoilers! Any good man would.” He shrugged like there wasn’t a question, like that kind of betrayal didn’t destroy relationships every day in the week.

“But—”

“Tolstoy thinks he would, at least. Look at what Pierre said.”

She looked down at the book lying open in front of her and read Pierre’s declaration again: _If I were not I, but the handsomest, brightest, and best man in the world, and I was free, I would go on my knees this minute and ask for your hand and your love._ Her heart melted a bit in her chest. Pierre, despite his tendency to let things happen to him, had won her affection the minute he babbled and stammered his way through his first salon. It really was beautiful. “But,” she added, not yet willing to give up, “Pierre doesn’t love her. He can afford to say those things.”

“Doesn’t he?” Fitz said, waggling his eyebrows over the rim of his mug, and she reached across the table to smack him. He dodged, still smirking, then changed the subject to an interesting mini-lecture about the shift in the way elopements were treated in literature that distracted her so much she forgot to argue her point any further.

But really, she thought later that night, underlining the entire second half of page 599, Pierre and Natasha might not be such a bad thing after all.

They bogged down in volume three, which dealt heavily with Napoleon and the movement of armies. Fitz admitted to skimming last time but she adamantly refused to allow it now. “Aren’t you the one who swears that great authors don’t put anything in without a reason?” she demanded.

“Yeah,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean he does it _well_. The good bits of the book are when he connects history to his characters and makes it real. Giving dialogue to Napoleon takes the reader out of the story, and it’s not really necessary to know all the details of how he—oh, sorry, spoilers.”

“Two-hundred-year-old spoilers, Fitz. I know Napoleon burns Moscow.”

“And with the Rostovs’ hoarder tendencies, you really should be more worried for them.”

“I’m only worried for Marya,” she said. “She’s all alone now. I can’t imagine Nicolai will get his act together, and I almost don’t want him to, the libertine.”

“Andrei is still alive,” Fitz pointed out, and Jemma flicked her fingers dismissively.

“What is Andrei good for? Moping. Every man in this novel is a disaster.”

“Weaknesses make characters more believable,” Fitz said.

“True,” she agreed. “Most men do have a tendency to unnecessary over-dramatics, so it’s very believable.”

Fitz ruffled up, indignant, only to subside and slump back into his chair at her raised eyebrow. “Fine. Then I’m going to use my male privilege and whine about these Napoleon bits, and you can lavish the attention you like on them while I return to reading I actually have to be doing if I ever want to finish my doctorate.”

“Getting rough?” she asked, sympathetic.

He shrugged, not meeting her eyes, and she noticed for the first time the dark circles that rimmed his weren’t just caused by shadows. He would never say so, but she knew him well enough by now—and remembered thesis hell clearly enough—to know what he kept silent. So maybe not all men turned into whinging babies. A guilty pang shot through her. “You don’t have to meet me,” she blurted out. “If you need to work, we can stop, or I can keep reading, since you already have. You don’t have to, if you’ve got other things to do.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” he said, more firmly. “I don’t want to stop.” He raised his head, offering her a half-grin. “We all have to have something to keep us sane, don’t we?”

“So they say,” Jemma agreed, feeling an answering smile bloom on her own face. 

 After that, they spoke less during their evenings together. Fitz did, after all, bring his work, shoving it into her scholar’s cupboard along with her own research, and she began to keep _War and Peace_ to read during that time. Curled in their customary chairs, tea and day-old pastries between them, most of the lights turned off and nothing breaking the silence but the sound of pages turning and clicking keys—Jemma didn’t know how much it kept Fitz sane, but she found herself looking forward to it more and more every week. Why, she couldn’t say. As interesting as the book was becoming, there was no reason for her heart to skip a beat when she woke up Monday mornings and remembered it was Cuppa Day, or to read the same page over and over until Fitz came to the end of his and could shove it aside for a chat. Or to not read at all, and just watch him over her book while he worked.

She was ruthlessly ignoring page 1157 when, feeling her eyes on him, Fitz took the pen out of his mouth and quirked his eyebrow inquisitively. “You all right?”

Telling him what she was actually thinking was out of the question, so she filled the silence quickly: “What do you think of the end of the book?”

“Well, I haven’t got there yet, for this read-through. And I’m going to tell you now, I’m skimming the last bit about how he decided to handle the history. I do not care. You can give me the summary.”

“Ugh, Fitz.” She rolled her eyes, considering whether to begin the age-old argument afresh and deciding against it. “Clearly, I meant the end of the story. Does Tolstoy ‘provide the necessary closure’?”

The last words mocked one of his pet phrases, and she expected an indignant protest. Instead, he looked away, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I mean, yes. Everyone comes to the end of their story logically. It’s emotionally resonant. It makes sense.”

Her eyes went from his hand to his jumping leg to his scrunched-up eyelids with their sinfully long lashes. Something was wrong. Something that didn’t have to do with the end of the book. “But. . . ?” she offered, making her voice as gentle as velvet.

“But.” He sighed heavily. “It’s not very realistic. Pierre and Natasha, I mean.”

She thought back to the last chapter, to the last books, to the way the love between Natasha and Pierre had been present at the beginning and grown and deepened as they matured. To the way their love for each other made them better people. To the way they were happiest together. “I don’t understand, Fitz. Why isn’t it realistic?”

“Because. . .” He sighed again as he opened his eyes, revealing a resignation that struck her straight in the heart. “Because guys like Pierre don’t end up with the heroine.”

Her instant objection got caught in her throat, stifled by his matter-of-factness, and he nodded as though she had agreed. “You said it yourself—all the men in this book are disasters, and Pierre is more than most. All he does is bumble around incompetently and get stuck in situations because he can’t figure out how to get out of them. At least Andrei and Nicolai have their military careers and are handsome and dashing. Pierre hasn’t got anything to offer, really. Natasha could do better than him, because she’s—well, she’s—” At a loss for words, he waved a helpless hand in the air.

“She isn’t perfect either.”

“No,” he agreed, “but she’s vibrant and beautiful and brave. She ought to—” Stopping, he shook his head and shoved to his feet. “It’s a book, and these things happen in books, but they don’t happen in real life. And they shouldn’t.”

And then he tossed the pen on the table between them, turned on his heel, and walked straight outside, the little bell over the door tinkling callously. Jemma sat, frozen, utterly at sea. From the beginning, Fitz had never been anything but enthusiastic about Pierre and Natasha; she had teased him more than once about being a shipper, and he hadn’t tried very hard to deny it. Where had this _nonsense_ come from? Of course Pierre deserved Natasha. He may have been a bit awkward at the beginning, but the longer one knew him the more one saw how kind and really, genuinely _good_ he was, how careful and respectful, how interesting and intelligent—even his flaws only made one realized how golden his heart truly was. Any woman would be a _fool_ —

She sucked in a quick breath. Oh. _Oh._ When, she wondered, had that happened?

The heroine of a novel would have flown out of her chair, heedless of her book tumbling to the ground and her tea splashing out of its mug as she set it hastily down, but Jemma—round enough to remember that the pages were fragile and Fitz would have to clean up any mess later even as her epiphany burst upon her—slammed _War and Peace_ shut and put both book and mug on the table carefully before abandoning decorum and sprinting out of the shop after him. “Fitz!” she shouted, looking frantically both ways and preparing to run.

“ ’m here.”

Spinning, she turned around to find him leaning against the building. The light above the door let her see just a glimpse of the bright blue flash of his eyes before he dropped them to the concrete. He had his arms crossed over his chest, one hand cupped the back of his neck, and the corners of his mouth were pinned painfully back. It almost looked like a smile, but not quite.

“Fitz,” she said again, heaving slightly. “It’s not like you to leave a conversation in the middle like that.”

One shoulder jerked up towards his ear. “Not much more to say.”

“I disagree. I have a substantial rebuttal to your position.”

“And what’s that,” he asked, kicking at a pebble.

She nodded, exhaling slowly in a fruitless attempt to still her shaking hands. “The thing is, yes, Andrei was handsome and rich, and he probably did really love Natasha. But he would have been horrible for her in the long run—they don’t have Russia in common.” He glanced up at her, a brief recognition of their many conversations about Tolstoy’s thesis. “I know,” she continued, growing calmer, “it was always going to be that way because Tolstoy would only give his self-insert a happy ending. But Tolstoy’s ego aside, it _should_ always be that way. Men like Pierre—they aren’t very common outside of books, I think, but when they exist, any heroine with half a brain would choose them.”

Fitz glanced up at her, tucking the hand that had been on his neck more firmly into the crook of his arm. Everything open in him had closed up, and she silently pleaded with him to hear what she meant, rather than what she said. “That point about Russia is a good one,” he said finally.

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “And the rest?”

He sighed. “ Heroines have to make up their own minds.”

“Yes, and I have.”

And with that, all subtext became explicit, and he looked up sharply, his mouth dropping open. She didn’t look away, canting her chin up more bravely than she felt—she didn’t claim to be an expert in subtext, after all, and could have misinterpreted his actions in Cuppa—but she wouldn’t back down now. He had been brave all those months ago, offering her a recommendation to read a book that would end up changing her life; she could be brave enough to offer him a reading of their story that might do the same. Unless—“But heroes have to make their own choices, too, so I’ll understand. There’s only fifty pages of the book left; I’m sure I can manage.”

Her voice trailed off towards the end of her sentence, losing conviction as she watched his eyes turning from dark to light and his lips slowly resolving into an open-mouthed grin. “There’s a problem with that, though,” he said, loosening at the elbows and shoulders and taking a small step forwards.

She matched him, mind racing for reasons entirely unconnected with his statement. “With what?”

Another step, and he was only inches away. “While I have no doubt that you can manage the last fifty pages by yourself, I know from experience that they are the most difficult, dense sort of historiography. If I don’t have my personal guest lecturer, I’m liable to miss everything important about them.”

She tilted her face up, barely holding back a laugh. “Well, we can’t have that, can we? We’ve come this far together, it would be a pity not to end as we’ve begun.”

“I quite agree.” His smile broadened, then smoothed out into something just as happy, but more serious. “Jemma. _If I were not I_ —”

Recognizing the words, she shook her head quickly, putting her hand over his heart. “You are, Fitz. And you don’t even have to ask.”

His hand came up to clasp tremblingly around hers, and his forehead against her own wrinkled as his eyebrows drew together. “I think it’s generally considered the gentlemanly thing to do.”

“The question is implied. My answer, however, is _yes_.”

So he leaned the rest of the way in to brush his lips against hers gently once, twice, before placing his hands at the small of her back to pull her to him more firmly. And behind her closed eyes, the Great Comet of 1812 streaked across the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> The translation that Fitz recommends, and I have used for any quotations in the fic, is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They're widely regarded to be the supreme translators of Russian novels, plus, guys, they're married and are totally the FitzSimmons of translation! Their work is amazing.
> 
> That said, the title comes from a quotation I found on Goodreads, the entirety of which is "Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women." I have no idea what translation this is or if it's actually from War & Peace at all, but my copy is on a different continent than I am at present, and I have no way to check. I apologise for my sloppy citation.
> 
> Oh, and The Night Circus is a real and fabulous book by Erin Morgenstern, and it too is across the sea in a friend's garage, so I cannot cite it either. Gulp. That's what you get for writing a fic in three separate calendar years.


End file.
